from the section-230-isn't-user-editable dept

Back in May, when literary agent Barbara Bauer sued the Wikimedia Foundation, claiming that it was liable for various critical comments on the site (such as the ones calling her the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents, who has "no documented sales at all"), we suggested she probably would have saved a lot of time, effort and heartbreak using Wikipedia to look up Section 230 of the CDA that says that service providers are not liable for the content of their users. Instead, she went forward with the lawsuit and had the court teach her the lesson that Wikipedia could have: the court tossed out the case, noting that the Wikimedia Foundation is not liable under section 230. The end result for Barbara Bauer? She doesn't get to sue Wikipedia, and her actions brought a lot more attention to the fact that she has a lot of critics. I have no idea how "smart" she is as a literary agent, but this didn't seem very "smart" concerning how to respond to criticism of her reputation.

from the too-little-too-late dept

Jacob Grier points out the launch of Britannica Webshare, a service that will allow bloggers to access the Encyclopedia Britannica for free, and even to provide links that will allow readers to read individual articles -- but not the whole encyclopedia -- for free. This is a fine step, as far as it goes. But it's a comically small step given the challenges Britannica is facing. The site apparently still won't be available to non-bloggers, and presumably that means it also won't be available on search engines. And that means they're throwing away a huge chunk of their potential audience. But the more fundamental problem is that Wikipedia is already a much better encyclopedia, and it continues to improve rapidly. Wikipedia is roughly as accurate and it's an order of magnitude timelier and more comprehensive. I wouldn't use Britannica much if it were freely available; I'm certainly not going to waste time applying to be a part of its "Webshare" program.

We write a lot about old-media companies that are struggling to adapt to the Internet. We usually suggestbusinessmodels that will help these business cope, and maybe even thrive, in the new technological environment. But I think Britannica might be a rare exception where the situation really is hopeless. Most old media companies, including Hollywood, the record labels, newspapers and magazines, and comic book producers, have a ton of content that people want, and that provides a foundation for their business models. In contrast, Britannica doesn't have any significant advantages over Wikipedia, and in some respects -- especially breadth and timeliness -- it's markedly inferior. As a result, it would be unlikely to get significant traffic even if it did everything else right. So I think there's a good argument to be made for laying off everyone involved in creating new versions of the encyclopedia and just leaving in place a skeleton staff in charge of selling the current edition to the dwindling number of people willing to pay for it.

The last time we wrote about the challenges facing Britannica, a representative from the company suggested a lot of people thought that Britannica hadn't yet made the transition to the web. But that's not my point at all. The fundamental problem is simply a matter of manpower. Wikipedia has tens of thousands of volunteer editors who collectively donate millions of hours of labor to the project. There's simply no way that a commercial encyclopedia edited in a traditional, hierarchical fashion, can compete with that. Britannica has to pay its editors, while Wikipedia gets its editors for free. Britannica likes to emphasize that its articles are written by credentialed experts. But this misses the point in a couple of ways. In the first place, while experts aren't given formal authority on Wikipedia, there are plenty of subject matter experts contributing to Wikipedia articles. More importantly, Wikipedia's editing process is based not on the authority of any one expert, but by citing reliable sources that anyone can check to verify the accuracy of the information. This kind of distributed peer review has allowed Wikipedia to produce a lot more content, with roughly the same accuracy, without hiring professional editors. There's just no way that a traditionally-organized commercial encyclopedia can keep up.

One valuable asset they do still have is their brand name, and I can see a couple of ways they might leverage it. One would be to simply auction it off to a totally different company that could put it to a better use -- the same way that the new Napster had no real connection to the old Napster. There might be a company out there with a different business model that would gain increased visibility with the Britannica brand. Another approach would be to turn lemonade into lemons by publishing a paper version of Wikipedia under the Britannica brand. This is one place where the established brand name would still be a big advantage; anyone who still wanted to buy a paper encyclopedia (it's a mystery to me why anyone would, but I'm sure they're out there) will probably prefer a Britannica-branded one, even if the content is identical to what you'd find on Wikipedia. Similarly, a lightly-edited, Britannica-branded web version of Wikipedia could generate some nice advertising revenue without requiring a big staff to produce new content. But I don't think there's any way a traditionally-produced encyclopedia can compete with Wikipedia, and programs like Webshare are too little, too late. The company needs to take some much more dramatic measures.

from the manufacturing-controversy dept

Let's say that I sold you a piece of land, and you then built a nice house on that land, and then you sold the property for a lot more money. Would anyone think that it was reasonable for me to then show up and demand a piece of the profits? Of course not. Yet when that scenario is tweaked just slightly into the digital realm and using $0 as the original price, suddenly people start getting things backwards. A few months back, for example, there was the situation with Billy Bragg complaining about the fact that musicians who chose to put their music on Bebo didn't get any of the AOL buyout money. But that was perfectly reasonable, because the musicians made a fair trade initially: they gave their music, they got publicity. Asking for money after the fact is no different then me trying to renegotiate my land sale after you made the land more valuable and resold it.

Now we're seeing yet another such case. Ethan Bauley writes in to point to an article suggesting that somehow Wikipedia authors are being ripped off because Bertelsmann is going to publish a paper version of Wikipedia for profit. But, again, it's the same thing. People who contribute to Wikipedia clearly felt that giving their labor away for free was a fair transaction. Bertelsmann is now trying to make Wikipedia valuable to a different audience by putting it into book form. They're taking on the risk of printing the book (building the house), and to have the various writers go back later and demand payment is equally as ridiculous. Luckily, it seems like most people recognize this -- and many comments on the ReadWriteWeb article point this out. It's just a few agitators, who apparently want to change the terms after the fact, who are having trouble getting this.

from the you-don't-get-to-edit-the-law dept

A literary agent named Barbara Bauer has sued Wikipedia for defamation after someone put a page up on Wikipedia that was quite negative about her -- with statements saying that she was the "dumbest of the twenty worst" agents, who has "no documented sales at all." There's no denying that the page on her was quite questionable, but that's also why Wikipedians quickly deleted it. While it was brought back a few times, each time, it was quickly deleted as being a rather obvious "attack page." As one Wikipedian wrote, the page was a bloody disgrace.

That said, it seems doubly wrongheaded to sue Wikipedia for this. First, as we've discussed many, many times, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) protects sites from the actions of their users. She has every right to go after whoever put up the page in the first place. But she shouldn't be blaming Wikipedia for it -- and any lawyer who would file this lawsuit should have known that and made it clear to her as well. Furthermore, this is a pure Streisand Effect situation. Before this, chances are that almost no one had seen the Wikipedia page. It was not up very long before it was deleted, and there probably just weren't that many people searching for her. Yet now, thanks to this, her name will forever be associated both with the claims she's trying to hide from the various news stories about this case, but those searching on her name will also see that she's filing lawsuits like this one. Again, this is something that her lawyer should have known. Of course, there are Wikipedia pages on both Section 230 and The Streisand Effect. A quick look around Wikipedia may have helped to avoid this unnecessary lawsuit against Wikipedia.

from the so,-please,-put-your-info-online dept

Google has always stated that its mission is to "organize the world's information." Of course, the problem with that is not all of the world's information is online, meaning that Google has needed to reach out and try to pull more information online. That explains some of what it's done with Google Maps/Local as well as Google's various book scanning projects. Now Google has announced another initiative, perhaps aimed at that same goal: it wants people to contribute static pages of information, which Google is calling "knols," short for a "unit of knowledge." It's certainly not a unique idea. In many ways it sounds quite similar to projects like Squidoo or Mahalo -- both of which involve getting people to create "pages" of information. Of course, both Squidoo and Mahalo (whether they intend to or not) really come off as Google arbitrage plays. They seek to create static pages that will rank high in Google in order to bring in traffic... which is then monetized by Google AdSense. The goal is that if you get ranked high enough, the cost of acquisition is lower than the income from the ads. Unfortunately, when you set up that type of incentive system, what you tend to get is borderline (or, in some cases, not so borderline) search engine spam.

Squidoo has been around for quite some time without getting much traction and Mahalo is too early to call. So, it's certainly reasonable to question whether or not knols will really take off beyond spammers (which, Google insists it will keep out). If it were any other company doing this, it would make sense to be quite skeptical of how well it would catch on, but you have to provide Google at least the benefit of the doubt in terms of being able to leverage its brand to make this take off in some form or another. Certainly, Google has had its fair share of failed projects -- and I'm not yet convinced that people really want to create pages of info just for the hell of it. However, of any company trying this sort of thing, Google probably has the greatest chance to make it work.

Of course, no discussion on Google's knol project would be complete without comparing it to Wikipedia (as many smart commentators are noting). However, in looking over the details, this doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia "competitor" so much as another reference for static information. It seems that the goals of this project are quite different than Wikipedia's -- which is focused on narrowing in on a clear, factual description of something. The idea of knols is almost completely antithetical to that concept. It's about recognizing a single individual's perspective on things, and allowing multiple people to put forth their perspective. Google is even hoping that people will create knols based on opinion, rather than trying to create factual pages. That's quite different. Neither approach is necessarily "better" -- they just serve different purposes, and assuming these knols catch on, what may be most interesting is to see how useful the combination of knols and Wikipedia are together. I've always believed that a Wikipedia-type approach works well for factual information, where you have to zoom in on a single point -- but it runs into trouble when you want opinion, insight and analysis, where you want multiple separate opinions rather than a merged one. That, at least is the theory behind our business as well, so it's nice to see Google appears to have a similar perspective. However, much of the work that we've done with the Techdirt Insight Community has been in aligning various incentives for people to provide useful analysis and insights (rather than useless or meaningless ones) -- and it will be interesting to see how much Google has thought through the various incentives at play.

from the more-reliable? dept

Wired has a roundup of two Wikipedia spinoffs that have been in the news recently. Both sites, Citizendium and Veropedia, were launched because their founders felt that Wikipedia had reliability problems that could only be addressed by an independent project. But their approaches are very different. Citizendium is what the open source software world would call a fork. They launched the site with some Wikipedia articles as the baseline, but they're not contributing their changes back to the Wikipedia project. That means that the two projects are diverging over time, and in a few years the content on the two sites will be quite different. It also means that there's going to be a lot of duplication of effort: the content in Citizendium and Wikipedia will largely be redundant. In contrast, Wikipedia is, in open source terms, "upstream" from Veropedia. Just as distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat take Linux code, improve it, and then package it for public consumption, making a profit in the process, so Veropedia is going to take a subset of Wikipedia, do some additional work to ensure it's reliable, and then publish it on an ad-supported site. Unlike Citizendium, Veropedia is planning to contribute its changes back to Wikipedia. Personally, I'm not convinced that there's a pressing need for either effort, and I'm particularly skeptical of Citizendium. I think Clay Shirky is right to question the underlying rationale for Citizendium, and while founder Larry Sanger has touted some modest successes over the last year, they're going to need some massive growth to catch up to Wikipedia.

Veropedia is more promising, especially since it's contributing to, rather than merely competing with, Wikipedia. It obviously can't hurt to have more people verifying the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, and if Veropedia can find a way to pay people to do that, that obviously helps the overall Wikipedia project. My only concern is that promising "a quality stable version that can be trusted by students, teachers, and anyone else who is looking for top-notch, reliable information" might lull people into a false sense of security, reinforcing the attitude that if you read something in a "reliable" publication, you can automatically assume it's true without further research. I would much rather that we teach students to approach all published works with a degree of skepticism, to understand that works fall along a broad spectrum of reliability, and that it's often a good idea to double-check important information in multiple sources. Still, it will be great if they find a business model that allows them to offer financial support to some of the dedicated editors who have made Wikipedia such a success.

from the might-be-a-bit-personal dept

We've seen all sorts of criticisms of Wikipedia over the years, but this might be a first. Apparently the group "Perverted Justice," the controversial online vigilante group that tries to lure online pedophiles out into the open (and is the group that is used by NBC Dateline's equally controversial "To Catch A Predator" show) is now claiming that Wikipedia is "a corporate sex offender." Apparently, if you follow the links from Wikipedia to Perverted Justice's site, it has a screed against Wikipedia -- claiming "each article on Wikipedia that deals with any issue relating to pedophiles or internet predators has been heavily targeted and edited by the online pedophile activist movement." Of course, there's a bit more to the story. Apparently, Perverted Justice's founder was recently barred from editing Wikipedia after people felt that he was flaming other users, deleting any negative reference to his organization, accusing others of being pedophiles without substantiation and when asked about it, replying "with invective." This suggests the anger at Wikipedia is a bit more about the guy being barred than any sort of official Wikipedia issue. If anything, it seems like yet another case where Wikipedia's neutral point of view has resulted in confusion. There's no doubt that Perverted Justice's reason for being is good -- but calling Wikipedia a sex offender seems quite extreme and unreasonable.

from the good-ideas dept

It always seems misguided when people complain about quality problems in Wikipedia while ignoring identical quality problems in other media -- and the fact that it's easier and faster to make corrections in Wikipedia when those errors are discovered. One thing that defenders of Wikipedia often point out, is that it's easy to check the history page of any Wikipedia entry to get a sense of whether or not a particular tidbit of info has survived the test of time or was just recently dumped on the page (or if there's been any controversy over it). However, the truth is not too many people actually bother to check the history page (even among those who bring it up as a defense of Wikipedia). It appears that Wikipedia may start experimenting with a creative idea to help deal with this: color coding sections of Wikipedia entries. If a change was made by a new or untrustworthy user, Wikipedia could color code it as red so any readers would know to be even more skeptical than usual about that information. As the information survives the test of time, then it could fade to black (so to speak). At the same time, users who have a long history of making trustworthy edits would have their edits more quickly "trusted" within the color coded system. It's a creative idea that seems to make a lot of sense for improving the overall quality of Wikipedia. It's almost a shame we can't do the same thing with other forms of media as well. The plan is apparently to test this system on the smaller Wikia community before rolling it out on Wikipedia, but it seems like an experiment worth following.